Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [130]
He remembered that as a child he had never gotten anything from anybody except regimentation; and the toys they were given at Christmas were all used, repaired toys that you could tell other kids on the Outside had gotten tired of and discarded, just like the clothes they wore; and there were certain toys that kids never wore out and that never showed up at the orphanage, such as baseball mitts and electric trains that actually worked; and he remembered that everything they had in the home was the gift of the faceless authority that ran the place, and none of the children ever got anything he didn’t deserve.
He thought about the orphanage carefully now, not with any particular self-pity, but abstractly going over the things that had happened to him, sorting out the good and rejecting the bad. He wanted Billy to be properly trained and brought up, but he didn’t want to hurt him needlessly; certainly he should not be undertrained as Jack’s revenge on the orphanage, or overtrained and deprived as a reaction to this. The trick was to strike the proper balance. There would be no cast-off, shitty toys for Billy, no empty nights with no one to be comforted by; on the other hand there would be tears, injustice, cuffings, yellings-at, and discipline. But the boy would know deep inside that it was done with love by a human being, not abstractly by a machine. Of course, that was what it amounted to; the boy would be loved. It was that simple. He would be loved, and he would know it, and that would give him the strength to face any kind of injustice. Jack had not been loved as a child; he had not even been liked. And it had almost destroyed him. He had been nothing until he had been loved. From that moment (the moment, he thought with a pang, of Billy’s death) his life had begun to improve, and with only a few setbacks, it had kept improving. The more he loved and was loved, the better his life got. At once it seemed to Jack like a magical solution to everything. If only everyone loved everyone else! Then there would be no trouble in the world. It seemed so easy. If we all just reached our hands out to each other, what peaks of human joy could we not achieve!
For hours one night he kept this simple idea in his head, wondering alternately why it would not work, and why it did not work. He tried to think whom he hated most in the world, and ended up realizing that he did not hate anybody. What he hated was ungraspable. It was not a person or persons, it was a thing. He wondered if he could stop hating the thing, and decided he could not. It had done too much to him. And he thought about hate; it was a kind of passion, not altogether dishonorable in itself but, like love, capable of the most awful sorts of injustice. Like the way so many people felt about Negroes, a hate not for anybody in particular, but for an idea, an abstraction of a kind of people who were hateful. Because they were to be feared.
So it was not hate, but fear. And love does not conquer fear. Or does it? How can you love when you’re frightened? Jack knew what he did when he was frightened: he struck. But the joke was, he had never in his life struck the machine itself, only people. In his twenty-five-year battle against authority, he had not landed one single punch. It was a great fight, Ma; I didn’t lay a glove on him. It. “My boy don’t fight till we hear it talk.” And